


The Art of Being

by FumeKnightofShovelry



Category: Dark Souls II
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-13
Updated: 2020-08-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:00:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 36
Words: 17,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24159280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FumeKnightofShovelry/pseuds/FumeKnightofShovelry
Summary: A collection of miniature stories on the bosses of Dark Souls II.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	1. The Last Giant

Vast, yet in perpetual fear of diminution. Terror of smallness drives many to shrink themselves in pursuit of more, until they are left with less than before if anything at all.

The Last Giant. The Giant Lord. Named, once, perhaps, but anything that might have constituted an identity rotted away long ago. Unless...

YOU.

Rage burns bright one last time. The heat long surrendered to being snuffed out has merely simmered, a single sparking ember beneath mossy, dampened wood, now brought back to YOU.

Entombed by stone and kin, life growing from death. Frozen perpetuity mummified with immobility, heedless of the course of time. But he neither passed on nor lingered beyond his era. He remembers one thing. He remembers enough.

OURS.

The creaking suggests frailty where there is only strength. No training bestowed this surety, only pain and weathering and long, long sleep. The cry reverberates throughout, the gangly fingers grasping at revenge and clawing for justice.

THIEF.

Sanguine has gone staid, but still runs red. The surrender of a part ensues the whole, and to a tree, a branch is little loss. 

GONE.

Beyond his age, lingering on. Now, at last, something akin to peace might fall over this shattered tomb, this monument to two dead kingdoms.

But The Last Giant, the Lord of the Giants, approaches tranquility. 

If not for other transgressions, gratitude might grip the knotted wood that takes the place of heart.


	2. The Pursuer

Sins. A single back can only bear so many. So who carries the transgressions of empire?

Monarchs? They exist beyond. If not, then they fall into what they have wrought.

What makes a King? Some say it is birthright, while others call it destiny. Perhaps it is not important, so long as a King's name serves to unite his people.

No, more often it falls to the rest, however it may. Small penitences scattered can only soften so much. Better to circumvent the purgatory and go right to deliverance...or damnation.

He, or they, or them, or she. All and none, one and many. Did they arise from our own misdeeds, birthed by some collective guilt, or come of their own accord to collect the tithe? It matters not now. All that there is to know is that you are hunted. You are prey, and they watch and wait to feast on your congenital crime.

Cut the curse, and curse the cut. Wound and salve, if only in their own eyes, and begone with the rest as they salt the blood.

The Pursuer, and Pursuers, will be waiting. When you hold fast to the light of hope, to the blessing of flight and freedom, they may yet remind you of its frailty. But they are but harbingers against the Dark Soul of man. The truest terror lies within.


	3. Dragonrider

Astride flying death, they conquered. At the behest of their once and future king, the center of their royal orbit, no matter his command, they crushed the fleeing, wyverns cooking them in their armor, piercing them with magic arrows, smashing them to pulp with their bulwarks, and cleaving them in twain with ensorcelled blades.

A mountain of graves lie just beneath one's feet, the foundations of Drangleic built on blood and carnage. Lost generations cry in vain, frozen in the moment of being burnt to ash and ground to meat. And they bore the standard.

V acuousness has gripped their mind, and they swing at you with a quavering, unpracticed hand, the bowstring unsteady in their grip. But they are still one of the knights that fashioned this land out of violence, and they know their craft well.


	4. Old Dragonslayer

Familiar, yet distant. Clawing and gnawing uncertainty, but an undercurrent of terrible, righteous rage.

A fascimile made whole, after a mirror shattered and embedded a piece in this land by the ocean?

A renegade chevalier, lost to the curse that festers in the breasts of men and those who purport godhood?

An agent of the murk that subsumed this land before the sea washed over its rooftops?

A split self, caught between two times and places, never belonging in either?

Answers elude and frustrate, but at the moment, a spear embolded by sparks and shrouded in darkness provides all the clarity needed. Leather straps stretch and creak, rusted and dulled armor groans in protest, and unnatural speed finds purchase in that crooked frame.


	5. Flexile Sentry

Are they of one mind and two bodies, or two minds, two bodies, constricted into the mobility of a singular being? They are twins, fed of one embryo, and never quite separated in birth. Double-faced, double-limbed, disunited in focus but brought together in role. Torment is their food, and they intend to feast. Ostensibly as Drangleic's bulwark, but their contortion matches their sadism. Reveling in suffering proves their life's work to be a fitting assignment.

_Cut them down. They must move faster. _

Bleed, then they stop and start again. Forever. Placid and empty and malleable.

_ No, hurry! End them, corral quicker! Struggle will shatter their levees. The Bastille will hold. _

It will not. Our King commands more.

_ But we would do it nonetheless. _

Of course.

_ Cram and stuff, and watch the wood bulge and leak._

The tide will take them.

_ Our duty holds? _

Our duty holds.


	6. Ruin Sentinels

The time of the Ruin Knights had passed. Their legend endured, whispered among the lands, of a company that had sought something so terrible that they were enslaved to its terrifying will, golems serving at the whim of some master, once party to the orders of King Vendrick.

The details had vanished, but the story persisted, and some sadistic soul found it within themselves to model a new legion on the fable. What better guards for a prison of Hollows than ones who could not Hollow themselves? They lacked true life, but that was secondary to their role. 

The techniques had been discovered and refined by the Old Iron King, but the mechanisms were sharpened further still by the Jailer. A soul, infused with life and vitality, but void of will beyond its orders. A skin of armor, built to house and disguise the emptiness within, modeled on the story of the doomed knights.

In time, their title would become more appropriate than their creator had realized. The Ruin Sentinels, caring not whom they served so long as they maintained the prison, became the caretakers of the Bastille once the guards had fallen to the same affliction as the convicted. Now, they roamed the halls, watching cells with no occupants and posts with no sentries, eternal slaves to the directive they had been given.


	7. The Lost Sinner

From a young age, the whispers had started. Faint echoes in the back of her mind, tugging at her ears, prodding behind her eyes with an insistent, tugging pressure to act on them. 

"You are guilty."

"You failed your kin."

"You exceeded your grasp."

"You are unworthy."

Such thoughts were common in a fledgling girl, but this was no common melancholy. No pedestrian self-pity and self-hatred, driven by status or fleeting things. This was older, harsher, and it had terrible purpose.

She had been marked from birth, and for a time she could ignore her destiny. But it would always come back, always seeking to remind her at her highest highs that she did not merit them, and at her lowest lows, that she could still fall to worse depths.

"You are a monster."

"You destroyed your home."

"You are a traitor."

"You are a parasite."

Perhaps there had been a man, a beloved, who had disappointed her. Perhaps she had fallen from grace, or perhaps she had overstepped her bounds. Or perhaps she was simply a woman, unfairly chosen to bear another's burden beyond its time.

Life was rarely fair, but her torment was unjust indeed. The tone was insistent, and in her misery, she could only surrender.

The chains were the easy part, digging into her wrists and ankles along with the pillory. The rags, damp and frigid, soon soaked with her own sweat and filth and blood from her manacles and flagellation. And then the mask, humiliating and dehumanizing and constructed for pain, forcing her eyes open and her cheeks to prick and ooze blood if she tried to speak or breathe too deeply.

In the darkness, she waited, and when the insect came, it carried with it her final message, implanted into her brain when the bug crawled into her eye, wriggling between the corner and ocular ball to hide beneath the skin. 

"We are sinners."

She could never understand the Witch's failure, but she knew it was more than one woman would endure, and so she took up the mantle appropriately. She would never leave, for it was an atonement beyond time's ability to obliterate. Lost and alone, frozen and blind and aching, she craved the freedom and penance that death would bring to them both.

But it was beyond her power to achieve alone. The gratitude when she beheld your entrance, knowing that you would claim her soul and end her life, was matched only by her determination to make her mortification complete with one final, pain-laden swing of her hobbled sword.


	8. Belfry Gargoyles

Alken had not always been at war with Venn. Quite the opposite, in fact, for both kingdoms were founded by the same man, once united in ideals and purpose. Now they were divided, and the only comfort between the lands was the lonely love between their princess and prince, each stranger to the darkness that existed within the heart of the other.

And through it all, they watched and waited. They had been erected long before Alken had arisen, and remained long after it fell and Drangleic came to the fore. Constructs of stone, content to observe and not impact, for all the world part of the same scenery that they guarded from rain. 

Had their animation been the product of a stray soul, or something else? Who could say? All that mattered was that they had their duty, and it was not to any one land, or any one ruler. They were gargoyles, and they would not suffer intruders to their tower to live.


	9. Scorpioness Najka

Her master was born with a fatal flaw, and it drove him to madness.

Perhaps she should have been grateful for his drive, for it led him to engender both her and her beloved. Existence beneath his Dukedom was not life, but mere survival, and yet it was preferable compared to the fates of many others beneath his power, experimented on in his laboratories, their deaths and reactions recorded in his archives.

And yet, even after his death, his existence endured, and she could not stay. But no matter where she fled with Tark, their creator's presence continued to dog them...and her own twisted state proved too much to endure. She tried to control it, for a time, but her vacant, unfocused rage needed an outlet, and her betrothed's lucidity only prickled her more when it should have brought her comfort.

They shrieked and fought and drifted apart, only to come back together to try it all again. Never enough to win, but they both lost, and she was left to wait in the sands alone for the day that he arrived to finish her off...or for the hour when her pointless fury would finally vent upon his crushed carapace.

Her tears would flow faster than his blood, then, if she still had the humanity to experience them. Only time would tell.


	10. Royal Rat Authority

Grandiosity sometimes need take the place of experience, but nature is a fickle teacher. It gives strength, and saps it, but always moulds, always pushes forward. 

Is this the fate of all Ratkind? Hardly, and undesired by both man and rat. Diminutive stature has its advantages, and rats employ them well. Even this giant carries a double pair at their beck and call, knowing their shortcomings.

But sometimes, exceptions merit exploitation, and this oversized curiosity will serve His Majesty well. So if size will function, then size will be welcomed.

The Rat King’s demands are fair, but He expects them to be met, and the instrument of His will must be suitably intimidating for a two-legged interloper. 


	11. Royal Rat Vanguard

Skittering in the darkness, alien to sunlight. They chitter, and squeak, and build and plan. They are pushed aside, deemed lesser and wanting.

But they are far, far more. Mayhaps not more gracious or enviably arrayed, but nonetheless holding some hidden value. And if nothing else, they are far, far more numerous, and they know it.

And they are more akin to humanity than either might recognize or acknowledge. Fleeing the light that humans cherish holds them the wiser, and the bipeds found lacking. 

His Highness treasures His subject, but a Rat King cannot afford to become attached to every one of His subjects. They treasure his love nonetheless. 

To be Rat is to serve, and grow, and seek. This swarm knows its strengths, as all rats do.


	12. The Rotten

Deep in the dark depths below the earth, something awoke. 

It was not the first to seek the siren song that called it, and it would not be the last. But only one lucky one could be the oldest, to partake of the power that lulled so many near, and that had lingered through ages to trumpet them onwards. A melody that lured the downtrodden and diseased, the refused and rejected, and the fetid and filthy to a singular point where they could find what they had all sought. 

The desire had lingered in their minds for longer than they could remember. The souls trapped, cast away by the world above, wanted to find comfort, and this old fragment of flame promised reprieve. It hummed of community and refuge and safety, and for many, that must have foretold the sweet release of death.

They could not have been more tragically wrong.

The first that had arrived had had no individuality to enjoy, subsumed by the older will that held the soul that drew them in its thrall. There were whispers that they had been an explorer, or a artificer specializing in bizarre contraptions and the locks that defended them, but the truth could never be known now. And then it had kept crying for more, drawing the lost and the desperate past the poison and into the abyss of blackness to become something greater.

Part of themselves. The one, The Rotten, and the many, The Rotten. United into a collective more powerful than they could have been individually, but without the chaos of disunited voices and competing wills. They struggled, and they heaved for separation and sobbed for relief from the crowded cage and melted flesh that bound them together but they did not know what was good for their own sakes anymore. The Rotten did, and the sooner they relinquished and obeyed their better, the soul framing them all together, the sooner they would understand the true value of the refuge and community they had found.

They would comfort the Undead the only way the cruel world permitted them to. Embracing all, in their sanctuary for all things unwanted and tossed away, and welcoming the pitiful refugees who fled even further into woe to seek salvation, they would be granted new life as part of The Rotten. Eternal and writhing in the blackness, clumsily assembling statues to nameless, faceless figures deep in some collective past, they would wait, and they would grow. 

After all...they could always accept more. More minds, more souls, more Hollows. All put to proper use and care in service to The Rotten.


	13. The Duke's Dear Freja

Within this mind had once burned a singular will, and it had driven them to madness. That was how it had always been: one drive pushing them forward, and then another, and then another, for all time. 

First, vengeance, against those who dared to exist beyond the shackles that bound them. They engineered the destruction of their kin, and watched and glorified in the extermination that followed. This was one appetite that could be glutted, over and over.

Then, knowledge, to better understand the conditions that had made them imperfect. A terrifying pursuit that alienated them from their new allies, and brought their dominions to the brink of ruin. This came to fruition, in a fashion, at terrible cost to all.

And finally, satiation. To undo the limitations that had been placed on them. The investigations were even more brutal and betraying than before, powered by forsaken, hopeless subjects and maiming ritual. This too succeeded, but by then, they had been lost to themselves.

And then they were slain, and forced to seethe in silence. 

Until their desires arose again, in the person of a lord seeking crystal, and their hopes found purchase in his pet. A hunger that grew and grew, without direction and true understanding, but knowing that their old kin must die, and that they needed MORE. More crystal, more magic, more material. 

The Writhing Ruin had gone by another name, once. It would be called many more before it faded from existence, if it ever happened. But the gnawing, horrifying consumption that festered within the Duke's Dear Freja had been born by the Father of Sorcery, the ancient traitor to the first beings to roam the world, when all was ash and gray.


	14. Skeleton Lords

They were doing their kingdom a service. That's what they told themselves, at least, and for some time that illusion could be maintained when the undead were random strangers who posed little threat and could be hunted down like any other game. They killed them, again and again, until their victim's sobs and pleas for mercy turned to mindless groans and hoarse cries, and their cringing from the pain morphed into utter apathy for the severing of limbs and puncturing of skulls.

Still they lied, and still they repeated the tale that this was for the good of their liege lord, but the facade was quickly fading. The number of undead grew and grew, and soon they were hesitating to strike down friends, neighbors, comrades-in-arms, and, eventually, family. 

By that point, the hunters had become something other than human, too. Their rote repetition of their task had left them with only a singular will to guide them: their own sadism. Their Iron King had grown distant from his bloodsports, his attention focused on his experiments with industry, fire, and automation. Without his guidance and without his cruelty to drive them on, the hunters fell, and the distinction between prey and predator vanished.

Some lingered on, shriveled husks of humanity, green and pallid and starched dry.  The most dangerous, however...they transcended beyond flesh, and their Darksigns robbed them of their forms until they were nothing but skeletons around decayed marrow. But that did not dissuade them from their newfound task. 

Their old allegiances were shed, and their attention turned to carving a new kingdom of bone. All would be one, and all would serve in the court of death.


	15. Executioner's Chariot

In another kingdom, the tipping point would have been desperation. The grip of terror unraveling the barriers of petty mortal morality, greasing the wheels of violence and persecution. It was a story that had played out many times before, in many fashions, but always with the same root cause.

The Undead Curse, that affliction that shriveled bodies into husks that hungered for souls and struggled beyond death, however much their empty minds might have begged for it. Manifesting in their Darksigns, the voids that swallowed their lives and vitality, it destroyed kingdoms from within, and those who fought against it never knew that its origins lay within their own bodies.

But it was not dire straits that drove the Old Iron King to do what he did. He was desperate, yes, but had the resources to attempt futile efforts to stymie the progress of the affliction.

No, it was simply depravity that drove him on. The thrill of finding yet another excuse to torment someone, under the logic that, as deathless beings, they could be hunted and slaughtered and tortured over and over without cease or exhaustion, save for the limits of the butchers themselves. 

His bloodsports consumed the warriors who carried them out, but by then something else had taken their mantle. The Old Iron King’s soul was mighty indeed, and some part of its great whole had split off to further aggrieve the undead. It took the form of a horrendous skeletal steed, two-headed but of one mind, a glimpse into the poison that lurked within the Old Iron King’s mind. 

The Hollows tried to tame the beast, and some were dragged along, but the will of the horse always won out. To call it an Executioner’s Chariot was a misnomer, for it never planned to permanently end the suffering of its victims. They would be run round and run down through the halls of the Undead Purgatory forever, dying and reviving only to be ground to paste beneath its hooves and wheels.


	16. Covetous Demon

She deserved a better man, and he deserved better attention.

He was not worthy of her affections, but he dared to hope, and it poisoned him. Desires with no hope of satiation are merely a cancer, toxifying the body and the mind under its own ambitions. But he could not stop himself, and he could not stop expressing his loneliness by pushing others away. When her misery reached him, and he saw he was still left cold and alone, he responded the only way he knew how.

When his hunger turned to need, taste faded in favor of devouring all he could, drawing everything into himself beyond his limits, and he never did realize that he had become what would repulse her all the more. But at least he found satisfaction in his solitude, and never knew her own monstrosity.


	17. Mytha, the Baneful Queen

She loved him, or thought it something like love. 

When the Prince of Venn had taken her as his betrothed, it had been the happiest day of her life. She never imagined she would want for anything, but, most importantly, she would at last be with the Prince she had longed and promised herself for. A noblewoman's hand in marriage secured land rights, furthered the spiderweb of alliances, and bound others in oaths and debts to a unified lineage. But she had always held him in such high esteem that the arrangement, and his whim, seemed the perfect match.

But the passion did not last. Distance grew, and he delved further into his bloodsports, experiments with fire and iron, and that curious fascination and camaraderie with the warrior from the east. She could have tolerated his inattention, and played the part of the ignored but dutiful wife and queen, if not for one thing.

That he had found a replacement.

Longing sighs, eyes on the horizon, and secret letters formed a story of another lover, a woman lower than herself, that had captured this tyrant's heart. Or, rather, of the same class of nobility, but foreign and adherent to their enemies in Alken.

She could not accept this challenger. The lands she had granted to her husband upon their matrimony still answered her call, and she followed his path of exploitation, labor encampments, and furious investigation. She mined out the valley that had once been the land's breadbasket, until the gases the spewed up from the depths of the earth poisoned the soil and sent even more slaves to their deaths, along with their overseers. 

She went further, then, and in her madness, she mixed the malaise of volcanic fumes with the liquid death that bubbled up alongside the smog. With her magic, it would, in her mind, preserve her in her youth and beauty, and secure his affection.

In her bleary-eyed focus, she could never see that the husband she longed to retain was already gone on his own path of self-destruction. The Old Iron King was no longer the man she had loved and obsessed over, and now his cruelty and greed had consumed him. She remained unaware of his deptavity, and of the fact that her experiments had begun to harden her skin into scales. And besides, her endeavors would never rekindle his love, for her appearance had never been the reason he had looked for another.

Her cabal of Jugo sorceresses assisted her, but even they, guarded by the wayward mummified grave wardens, could not give her what she wanted. When she beheld her new visage, reptilian and verdigris, she shrieked, reached for the blade she kept to guard her bedchamber, and separated her head from her body in a font of green-and-red blood, severing the collarbone with arms strengthened by the poisonous trials she had endured.

But she did not die, and as her head rolled to the ground, she lowered herself on her tail and grasped her hair, lips hissing without lungs, beholding her own form. Twisted, yes, but beautiful in a horrible, mangled way, serpentine and sultry but also frozen in time from the moment she had gone down this path of self-destruction. 

Her servants were made to cover or obliviate their heads. Most chose to hide beneath hoods and cowls, but her dear manekins, eternal and devoted puppets, had their faces torn off for daring to look upon her new form. 

Now, she waited for the husband she had destroyed herself for to come crawling back, awed and obsessed with the beauty she had captured, and the monstrous nature she had personified. A sentry post she would hold forever more, not being privy to her husband's own end...and the ruination of her would-be rival.

But Mytha would not despair. Beauty was its own reward, and in her twisted psyche, she held it in perpetuity. All that mattered was that she was Queen, and that she was beautiful.


	18. Smelter Demon

Fire and iron. Together, they minted coins, smelted swords, fashioned plows, molded pickaxes, cooked meals, hardened foundations, and constructed edifices. They powered industry, generated wealth from misery, and tempered mineral gifts into human tools. They burned and pierced and boiled and smashed, and they pushed forward the engines of empire.

And, together, they were imbued with life. With a soul, but without the depth of true understanding. Had they been molded as such by human hand, out of misguided nostalgia for the baser elements of progress, or been born from some other melding of flame and earth and alloy? Those who might have answered were dead, or so far transformed that they were as good as gone.

Whatever the case, the consequences could not be undone, and the world would be plagued by its end product, by the spark that had immolated and consumed so many fragile hopes and desperate dreams. The Smelter Demon would linger and wait, a hidden terror in the lost lands of the Old Iron King, keeping vigil over the corpse of the castle it had hastened to destruction.


	19. Old Iron King

Humble beginnings do not make a humble man. He who took up the mantle of one of the two squabbling kingdoms would not have been blamed for limiting his hopes to fit his circumstances, but the monarch who would become the Old Iron King had little use for restraint. His ambitions would bring him and his realm and power to heights greater than anyone else could have conceived, and he would not allow the reality of his situation to stop his grand dreams of glory.

Two boons enabled his rise, and building off of these gifts, he ascended to the peak of royalty, commanding vast armies and expansive, productive dominions. His court flourished, his might prospered, and he found security for the future in a noble wife. 

But men are but men, and power colors the vision of even the most restrained. His attentions for his spouse, never strong in his heart, waned in favor of another, separated by war and distance, and his neglect would harken ruin for those under his Queen’s direction. 

His fascinations with battle would, when enemies proved lacking, be turned on his own people in fits of violent, massacring rage. The Undead Curse proved the perfect excuse to normalize the bloodsports and legitimize the carnage, even as he ignored its root causes and was heedless as it ate away at the foundation of his power. 

The vastness of his wealth and mineral resources proved more than he could reasonably use, and so he squandered it on frivolity, foreign entertainments, and projects of even grander wastefulness. 

...Except, of course, when they bore fruit. For his obsession with the hallmarks of his reign—iron and fire—found purchase with his cabal, and his successes were matched only by his deepening fervor. Granting life to iron required enormous amounts of smelting and industrial production on a scale the world had never seen, but the automatons that guarded his halls and borders were animated souls in a facsimile of life and duty. Giving will to flame proved more troublesome, but, in a fashion, perhaps he won out there, too. 

His greatest benefactor had long since abandoned him, the second time such a choice had been made. Perhaps that had been the final straw, the tipping point into unrepentant despotism, but his victories in fire and iron occluded his misery.

More than he ever should have hoped for. In his hubris and greed, he’d peered beyond his ken, and when his castle was swallowed by the lava that gouged the stones and steel, the flesh that had housed his power-poisoned spirit was boiled and consumed. He would never know if what had struck him down had lurked below, waiting and watching, or if it had been born of his own excessive ambition. Perhaps it had fed on his industry, on the parades of souls he had condemned to the fire to fuel his automatons.

But now, he was something else entirely. Something had been sunken even deeper below the magma that flooded his keep. Something greater and more ancient, and now he was both part of it and more. He was the vessel of Ichorous Earth, but he would never lose his grip on his dominions. Even if he only ruled ashes, smoke, and solder, he would never relinquish the mantle of Old Iron King.


	20. Looking Glass Knight

Three faces. Three faces to look upon would-be-knights as they broke themselves upon its shield, weapons scattering until they were too vanquished.

Tears drenched its eye sockets, but it did not cry when its challengers were defeated.

A frown danced at its lips, but it did not mock the failure of its foes.

Only the placid sheen of its visage reflected the solemnity of its duty. It took no pleasure in preserving the merit of its lord’s chivalric order, and felt no shame in its service when it was conquered as the final step in someone’s ascension.

The Looking Glass Knight simply...was. Whether it was a golem, animated by one of the King’s arts, or the most stoic man in the realm was never certain. All that was known was that it was real, and it was terrifyingly effective. The mirror on its shield bled into other worlds, but the figures that stepped through never spoke, and faded before long had passed. It was whispered that the failures become one with the Knight, in service as Mirror Squires to better test those who would follow in their footsteps, but no one was ever certain, even when the death of the vanquished could be confirmed. Perhaps such rumor merely served to dissuade the timid from the trial.

When King Vendrick scurried from his castle, fleeing beyond its walls and past its protections to find some other sanctuary, the Looking Glass Knight waited faithfully at its post. If it understood that its duty had grown beyond mortification of prospective knights, past their humiliation, subsumption, and penitence in service to their liege to arise as true chevaliers, and had become the first line of defense against pursuit of the runaway king, no one could say.

Yet the Looking Glass Knight remained, implacable, and would remain forever more. By the King’s decree.


	21. Demon of Song

Wherever it had come from, whatever it might have once been or whomever might have engendered it...none of that mattered anymore. It bore the name of those afflicted by the chaos of vine and flame, but many souls carried themselves with that title now. If its origins lay there, it was of no consequence to those it now stalked. 

In Lindelt, old mistakes and forgotten lessons had manifested as theocratic absolutism and stringent conservatism. The unfamiliar was to be destroyed, lest it corrupt the meek and confuse the naive, and nothing was more worthy of scorn than that which lured in the innocent. 

Had the Demon come to Lindelt, or had Lindelt gone to the Demon? Or perhaps nothing of the sort had occurred, and the reach of one had simply stumbled into the other. Whatever the case, once its appetite was whetted, even the most reserved among the clerics knew that something had to be done, and the priestesses fashioned for the task knew the stakes of their duty. Its prison would be distant from their homeland, and the line that maintained its barriers would likely never return to their beloved churches, strict as it was. But such was their sacrifice. 

Satiation through song, in concert with other, darker, eternal muses. Lulled to sleep by ritual prayer and tonal harmonies, it was content to wait. And, unbeknownst to its jailers, to learn. 

When the Curse touched the flesh of its captors, it emerged deadlier than before. Its captors now hollows, it saw no satisfaction in gorging its empty stomach in some form of revenge, and aspired to greater cunning. 

Clearing the place for its trap had proven easy. Its enemies, frail humans, could be broken or sequestered with little difficulty, and whenever still silence settled over the shrine, it sang. 

Its voice sounded out, following the model of the vocalists that had been party to its sealing, and it was as patient as it was starving. It had yearned to feast for many, many years. It could wait a little more. And it would happily, stoically spin its web of song whenever a meal approached, until the void yawned to be filled once again, forever more.


	22. Velstadt, the Royal Aegis

In his consecrated ring, Velstadt waited.

Once, he might have been something lesser. Or more. Serving by the side of his King had both diminished him, and elevated him to greater heights than ever would have been possible otherwise. He had served and shrunk, and he had shared in glory and grown. 

But some part of himself had been lost, irrevocably. In the back of his mind, if his thoughts had turned to something other than his Lord, he might have recalled fleeting images. Of drenched temples and crumbling spires of stone, built to honor a vestige of the Age of Ancients. Had he left before it had collapsed, or was he a witness to the miasma that blanketed it? He could not tell, and it did not matter.

In his sphere of sanctuary, Velstadt watched.

He’d found new purpose, serving a lord,  _ his _ Lord, always by his right side in King Vendrick’s shadow. He carried the lost whispers of prayer towards the sunlight in his breast, murmured up to suffuse him in warmth and protection. His Lord’s ambivalence towards clerical paths, and the suspicion he cast on all reverence of Light, was waived for his dearest, most loyal knight. 

Velstadt had proven his worth and merit many times over. Whether in word, deed, or bearing, he was the reflection of Vendrick’s might and the channel for his power, and he welcomed his servitude without greed, hubris, or jealousy. He was Vendrick’s Right Arm.

Even when another took the mirror of his place on Vendrick’s left side. Darker and even more a wall of silence and stone, bearing a raven-heralded square shield in his right hand and a long blade in his left. 

Vendrick’s Left Arm was shaded where Velstadt was light, agile where Velstadt was stalwart, elegant where Velstadt was straightforward, sharp where Velstadt was blunt. When they pierced, danced, dodged and deflected, Velstadt instead bashed, crushed, smashed and rushed. But they were knights, and they were Vendrick’s, and they were as close as any brothers. 

In his lonely fastness, Velstadt pondered.

Whatever had split right arm from left was beyond his memory now. It was all in the past. His counterpart was gone, and Velstadt remained even as the darkness settled over Drangleic deeper than ever before. When his King fled, and Velstadt ordered his knights to keep their posts, he knew that they would obey him beyond death. Their wills would hold and their bonds would harden into stone, though Velstadt was long gone by the time their sentry posts became the foundations for statuery. 

Now, in the recesses of the world, sequestered between layers of protection and guardians against some unknowable terror, Velstadt held fast.

In his silent protection, Velstadt thought.

The knights that had come with them, one final bulwark against undoing, were only precursors to the terror Velstadt would wreak upon any who disturbed his King. Even as the darkness of the Crypt intruded onto his soul, and gilded his faith in familiar shadow, Velstadt stayed whole, and he stayed ready. Whatever assailed his self would not blockade his duty. And there were many, many more trials his Lord, in his wisdom, had set for usurpers.

Vendrick ran and hid and waited, and when he could not wait any more and nothing was left, Velstadt still kept his post. No one would threaten his King, and no one would undo his work. There was too much at stake, even if he could not understand it anymore. He was the Royal Aegis, the truest protection his King could have. Whether or not Vendrick could understand his service anymore, or ever had, was never the point. Velstadt's happiness had always been an afterthought, and he had sacrificed too much to give up here. How else could he honor Vendrick's wishes? There were no congratulations to be found, anyway.

In his sad vigil, Velstadt mourned.


	23. Guardian Dragon

Did they know their own strength? Their own might, stunted as it was by eons of degradation, of separation from the glory of their ancestors? Was their confinement a willful submission of their power and an acknowledgement of the supremacy of their new master, or a subversive erosion of their natural hostility?

Wyverns and drakes are reflections of their age, defined by those who look upon them. To the humans who bear witness to their might, they are terrors, however paltry, but to those familiar with their ancient precursors, they are symbols of the degradation of the natural order. Of the usurpation of ancients to fire, and the perversion of fire’s drive to burn itself out. 

Perhaps the wyverns are merely beasts, and do not care for the metaphysics of their existence. Meat and play may be enough to garner their attention towards the cause of obstructing a forbidden passage, and there are ample Undead to glut their appetite. They may know their power, and lack thereof, and choose to ignore their humiliation. 

Or, perhaps, they know their weakness, and choose to fall before those who would cozen fate herself. The ones, or one, who stood their ground when the disarrayed world threatened to upend them by the course it had set, and said “I refuse.” Who could stand before them?

Were they ensorcelled, brought to focus their minimal will to new purpose? Made to hinder passage to that most ancient of secrets, to adopt the role of guard, lest the tools to unmake kingdoms be laid bare for those meant to be kept out? 

Whatever the case, it made terribly little difference. Mighty as they were, wyverns and drakes were but paltry reflections of their ancestors, and the fear they inspired spoke more to the weakness of men than the power of their dragon’s blood.


	24. Ancient Dragon

When the world was staid and still, they were. Born in the mist, elevated from the stone and fog that surrounded them. A land of gray crags, Archtrees and Everlasting Dragons. They persisted, and they lived, such as they did.

And then, they were no more. With disparity came division, with division came conflict, and with conflict came destruction. They fell to the last, charred and plagued, skewered and shattered, broken and betrayed. Those few that survived, cowed and humbled from their high perch, scattered to the forgotten reaches of the world, obfuscating their legacy even as their magnificence inspired reverence and fascination and the world continued without them.

Had it died so long ago, slain in those furious, terrible battles that ravaged the world and destroyed the Age of Ancients, ushering in the flourishing hope and ephemeral stability of the Age of Fire? Or had it wasted away, anonymous and alone in desperate flight from those who had destroyed their kin? Or...something else, perhaps?

Those who had cleaved its age in twain to make way for the new were long gone, in some form. And now only it remained, in a fashion. Was it aware of its own frailty, of its own secrets, or did it exist apart from them? If its magnificence was an act, then it perfectly played the role, guiding the props on the stage of life as it was itself directed. It had its own comforts...and its own fulfillment in lonely, parental love for a girl born of two worlds.

And perhaps it mattered not. To humans, it was still a symbol of the power of the ancients, a token to arouse humility in those few worthy seekers. The fog that had cloaked the world, that it carried with it even now, would part and warp when peered into in search of answers.


	25. Giant Lord

He was eternal, unchanging. Solid even while the world swirled, cragged and grained as the spires and trees that graced times long gone by. A different sort of grandeur swept the sky then, and a different manner of giant followed, but he was neither. Nor were those in his image, and those that followed after his fashion, or those that had preceded his crowning. He molded them as his own, and their minds were united in the roots of their home after the violence that had been churned by differences faded in conformity. Their reach expanded outward to draw more into their fold, to become part of the true connected self.

_**LORD.** _

Their thoughts were as one, their wills bonded in vine and stone that percolated their bodies and melded their hopes. They dreamed and drowsed, stolid in their tranquility, lulled by their comforts. As their tangle grew ever tighter, the convulsions from their disunity faded and they were eroded into placid order.

_**ONE.** _

Continents do not concern themselves with the scurrying of life atop them. They shift and slide, heave and crack, belching the lifeblood of worlds no matter the pretensions of those that hold themselves up high on their surface. So, too, do the great leviathans of the deep shift and spiral, as the titans shrug and lumber onward, both heedless of the tiny minutiae around and on them. Mountains can divide, but they do not adjust to borders and disputes, and shed sleet and erupt with furor without regard to conflict and division. As it was with the Giants, and their Lord, and their oneness together.

_**SELF.** _

In death, they slipped into the eternity of dreams, and lived out their lives and those before. The stillness that gripped them in life faded in death, and they returned to the stone and soil that composed them to flourish anew, still part of the one greatness of being a Giant. 

_**EMPTY.** _

They were no stranger to death, but those who sailed from afar on mangled trees did not fight as they did. This new fire burned higher and faster than their own, their venoms shriveled and struck more swiftly, and their iron implements cut and shattered in ways the Giants had yet to see in their own ragings. And so it was that they were found, and so it was that some were separated, humming from afar in shrinking pleas.

_**OURS.** _

They followed, their wills driven to singular purpose. To wrack and ruin, destroy and conquer, to tear apart until that which was theirs, and part of themselves, was drawn back to them, lest it be emptied even more to further wider fears and hopeless remedies. 

_**NO.** _

He stands before you, one Lord to one who has slain Lords, a King to one who would take the Throne. Kingship is not so swiftly discarded, and its mantle not so gracefully taken. He has conquered and ventured as you have, and when you stare into the void beneath his crown, something familiar may squirm in the darkness. Will you see it when you strike him down, when he falls in the pattern of his kin, even as he refuses to put down new roots and thrive anew in death? 

_**YOU.** _

And so it is that you stand before him again, before and after. A Lord no longer, and yourself yet to be a monarch...yet both of you have already been each, and Kingship is not relinquished easily, even if any fool can clutch a crown. It is as it has always been, and forever will be, till time sunders beneath the weight of this threadbare loop. Familiarity does not breed compassion, even as the final sleep encroaches.

_**END.** _

Beyond his age, lingering on. Now, at last, something akin to peace might fall over this shattered tomb, this monument to two dead kingdoms. But The Last Giant, the Lord of the Giants, approaches tranquility. If not for other transgressions, gratitude might grip the knotted wood that takes the place of heart. 


	26. Throne Watcher and Throne Defender

The throne of a king is sacred, and must be observed closely at all times. 

Whatever might have separated the observer from the golems that surrounded them and that had effected change for Drangleic had wasted away once darker influences had crept in. 

The throne of a king is sacred, and requires an appropriate guardian.

Perhaps they had been human, once, and fallen into Hollowing and the reach of the Abyss. Or, most terribly, mayhaps the grasp of those who came before, who lurked within humanity’s own roots, exceeded the void of automata, and tangled even empty vessels from their purpose. A cancer that ate at the heart of the world.

Will their wishes be fulfilled? Will their waiting be rewarded? 

A cancer, a poison, but without it...freefall, from whatever scraps of balance remained into the depths of pure disorder. But if the weights are broken, that may yet be agreeable.

Will their wait be worth the while?

A shattered step collapses the wheel, but replacing it merely continues the cycle...and fails to ascertain if it should even reach its destination. These two, steeped in Dark, numbly in service to something  _ else _ , should serve as ample warning as to the merits of blind adherence.


	27. Elana, the Squalid Queen

Shriveled and alone, brought to madness and twisted into more of himself than he could possibly ever hope to be, the Father of all that was human perished. But that which lurked within mankind was not so easily reduced to nothing, and could never fade so long as its component ilk still walked the earth.

So it was that each tiny splinter, minute and alone, alien to all it could know and sheared from the only one that might be called familiar, came to be.

Fear, wrath, solitude, love, and so much more. All pieces in the puzzle that was the Dark Soul of humanity. And that which scarred deepest, and festered most insidiously, tiptoed into patience and planning, eating away at the certainty of the self.

Wrath is older than the pretension of virtue and evil, and is even older as an immutable truth. It perverts passion into obsession, contorts fear into disgust, twists power into punishment, shapes regret into revenge, stretches unfamiliarity into rejection, and warps violence into butchery, to name but a few. Left alone, it boils and erupts, a final blow to that very same will that gave it life, hoping only to diminish that which it railed against. She was the ruling that exceeded justice; the retribution that overcame the offense; the violence that surpassed necessity; and the unbalanced rage that burned itself up and burned itself out, leaving a charred husk, devoid of that which had spurred it on. 

She was in every soldier whose passion brought them out of one more battle, every oppressed whose will was sustained by bitterness, every sundered hope that refused to acknowledge despair. And Elana could not stop burning with rage, and she could not stop howling for vengeance. Her rancor was her goal, her end, and her entire self, the energy that sustained her as she lashed out in service of directing her anger, and she had never had a choice in the matter. Born into invisible shackles from the very start, an augur of wrath, of all the fury and rage that humanity had ever conjured in their passions.

She toiled and seized as a fragment of the Abyss, turning her roaring to a growl to subtler purpose, all for the plan. More power, more souls. More Dark, more of that tranquil shadow, stifling all that it did not contort into its own purposes in the deepest, darkest, most suffocating peace and stillness. But the calm that awaited and the calm that she was mired in were not the truth of her heart, of her birth, and of the humanity that she was party to. Her anger found form in queenliness and command, piety and righteousness, devotion and carefully concealed machinations. She was a priestess, and a monarch, and her word was law and her will was the word of their worship. By her side, he waited without comprehension, feeding her vengeance with the grandeur of his soul and his hopes in his god. A titan of gray and earth, long dormant, a remnant of mismatched time. It would serve her well, and her prayer became its taint, a twisting of its deification into the weapon that would avenge the only death that mattered. And for that, she needed time, and she needed focus. Souls were the only fuel she needed, save her own wellspring of rage, and Queendom was as performative as her piety. 

Idiocy and blind faith cut her vengeance short, and she was not ignorant to the irony that the pursuit of that older lifespring was none too dissimilar to the poison that crept from her heart to her charge’s. Her careful tangle of threads collapsed, but an eternity of festering rage gave rise in her to a patience beyond men, and purification could be undone with time.

Perhaps Elana might at last attain what she needed, in revenge for Manus and the Dark Soul. That old wrong, that dissipation of humanity into so many elements, even more than it had already splintered. A perversion of what should have been, of the Dark and the peace of a lightless Deep. But her venomous, scalding rage had never been in service to the stillness of Dark. Her whole being was vengeance, and beyond destroying that which the crime had allowed to exist, her purpose was nil.

Elana could not demand rest. Rage does not abate slowly, only burns itself out, as the perverse Flame that nurtures souls only to collapse on its own heat. Elana could not stop hating, not stop swearing vengeance. An augur of wrath is cursed to despise everything that exists in spite of themselves, and thus, could never truly be free. 

In death, this churning, writhing, monumental shard of man, and daughter of Manus, will not find the revenge she seeks, and her wrath will go unquenched. But such passions never bring peace, and Elana has only ever been a creature of zeal.


	28. Sinh, the Slumbering Dragon

In their dreams, they still saw that which had come before. Gray and shrouded in fog, still and sluggish. So slow as to invite growth, but also ward off change from inactivity. The hurtling had passed them by, and as they slept, they knew not what had moved and shifted in the great wheel of the world. Such was their peace that they remained undisturbed, unawoken, free of the turmoil and the flowering that had eclipsed their kin.

Sinh was diminutive, but still a titan, and older still than those that had brought his ilk to their end. Their nest was a mausoleum to dragonkind, unknown to themself, anonymous to intrusion and incursion. But their long hunger demanded longer rest, and so, satisfied, they caroused through the fickleness of imagination, and twitched and sighed and crept through darkness. 

They were not ken to the marvel that they aroused in mortals, to the wonder and fascination that their survival, such as it was petrified in sleep, entranced and enthralled. The altar became a temple, and a city, and a nation, and through it all, they remained unaware. 

A maxim for Sinh, but for Shulva as well. For their worship had been poisoned from the start, tainted by the web of Dark, and the churning of men. Thus it was that both dragon and devotees were ignorant, of deification and majesty alongside machinations and manipulation. It was the failings of men, too, that brought it all down, as mysticism and misplaced piety gave way to the superstition of those intoxicated by the primordial essence of life. 

In this chaos, Sinh’s green eyes opened for the first time in centuries. It was not in comfort, nor in safety, as bright blood withered from their body, drawn from a sharpened point. Their roar was of pain and confusion, rage and horror, and the poison that erupted from their person was as much a call to cleanse as a hope to repulse. 

If they knew of the acid that had eaten away at them for ages, seeking to supplant their soul for rage in pursuit of silence, then they had no way of telling anyone else. Nor, indeed, anyone else to tell, for the cataclysm of their awakening was the augur of Shulva’s end.

Now, the dragon roams, lonely and in pain, a forlorn survivor of an ancient purge, and the only apparent power in the nation that would have made them a god. A miserable existence, trapped beneath the eons of geology that roof their domain, but the only life they have to live, pierced as they are.


	29. Fume Knight

He had gone by many titles. All carried their own power, and their own significance, whether projected outwards or a secret, cradled within his person. All formed a part of him, and all were treasured, even when cast aside. 

The Left Arm. A sinister angle, but a necessary one, for the demands of power are not to be put off, and every apotheosis demands sacrifices. And he was not alone. Mirrored to the Right, both in the glory of their Lord. A role he had played well and true, never wavering or faltering, joined in duty to this pinnacle of humanity. And they were the finest of all who might have called knighthood their vocation. One foreign, but holding faster, and him nearer in nation, but holding himself apart. He was shaded where the Right was light, agile where the Right was stalwart, elegant where the Right was straightforward, sharp where the Right was blunt. When he pierced, danced, dodged and deflected, they instead bashed, crushed, smashed and rushed. Velstadt could hardly have been any more different. But they were knights, and they were Vendrick’s, and they were as close as any brothers. He had entered service as such, and his presence would linger long after it was vacant. The title of Left Arm was one he bore proudly, and openly.

The Raven. An augur of death, despised and rejected for the glutting of carnage. Misblamed as symbols and causes of misery, rather than mere opportunists of whatever had brought about degradation, and were turned away from their fair share of spoils. He saw himself in them, in their jet cresting and curious gaze and questing, inquisitive perusal. He had modeled himself after their probing, darting style, weaving and flying, seeking and pinning, and appropriated the appellations of envy that called him host for scavengers. If that was what his King demanded, and how he went about his work, that was what he would be, and he had already marked himself as befitting such intelligence and agility. The cleaning of dregs was no dirty work: it was purity, and cleanliness, and the ablution of the necessary consequences of violence. He welcomed the fluttering, spiraling feathers, and always left a feast. The title of Raven was one he took privately, but earnestly and honestly. 

Son and Brother. His true family was forged in camaraderie, and steel, and victory. His King was his father, and Velstadt his brother, and the bond they shared was both stronger, and more distant than that mixed by blood. He adored his King, even if he never truly understood the burdens of leadership, and he loved his comrade-in-arms, no matter their differences, and whatever their competition and dispute. Open declarations were not their way, but they all knew they shared in their kinship. In those days, it seemed that nothing could ever snap that link, that connection stronger than mere subject and ruler, or ally in combat. Brotherhood, and the guiding influence of a father, felt unwavering and eternal. The twin titles of Son and Brother were ones he held close to his heart, treasured and guarded.

The Rebel. He had always chafed against command, however much he had adhered to it, and however different his methods were from those that might have been expected of his station. But his rebellion had only ever been personal, smaller deviations, little wanderings from his Lord’s edict that held simple strength above all. He was not disloyal, but obedience took on many forms, and his lofty position at his Lord’s side merited some freedom of the mind. Vendrick had never demanded flattery, and Raime had never forsaken honesty in favor of expedience. For to him, the truth was kindness enough, and Vendrick respected his candid demeanor and unorthodox style...even as the stirrings of friction began to grind against his brother-in-arms, the Royal Aegis. And then, Rebel was insufficient to describe his division. The title of Rebel was one he had failed to understand the power of, even as he came to recognize the deficiencies of fermenting discontent.

The Traitor. Easily bandied about, for justice is defined by the reigning power, and peace is not so peacefully earned, or quietly maintained. Even if its dissolution can be the most tranquil, serene fall imaginable. Whatever had split Right from Left was beyond memory. Had it been the truth of Dark, unsupported by strength, that had cleaved the union? The refusal of rejection, of seeing folly in fighting nature, however unfair and imposed? Pettiness, or greed, or glory, or any of that which might turn comrade to rival, and rival to avowed and damned? Perhaps it no longer mattered, for two such wills would never have stayed in concert, exhausted as the outputs for their energy had become. And however true it holds that the brighter the flame burns, the deeper the shadows cast, there still lies an ebb and flow to power. The title of Traitor was one he knew, and held fast to, lest he forget that a brand, wielded carelessly, burns only its holder, and charred words could still spark cinders.

The Exile. Broken and beaten, banished and brought low. Then, the cause had still been fresh, and though time had eroded the details, he still knew the truth. That without power, right, or the belief of right, is useless. Right had vanquished Left, and in the absence of one, the other would waver, and both would be diminished. So he sought strength, in the belief that the rest would follow, and cast aside the bulwark that had gilded his dexterity. And found the might he sought, embroiled in a flame swathed in Dark, eternal yet on the brink of burning out. Dilapidation disguised that most primal of power, that true reflection of the sliver of that first soul that he, and his Lord, and his brother all held within themselves. It whispered, either mistaken or desperate, and in any event miserable, and he saw in the mist that same pain of absence. And he knew the course to run. The title of Exile was one he accepted, and treasured, for without it he would have been bereft of what his sentence let him find.

The Fume Knight. He had the power to purge it, to cleanse the factory, to expunge the black fog that lured in souls, and occluded their will in urgent, pleading murmurs, fruitlessly hopeful that relief would come, and that in its vacancy, trinkets and puppets would do. But he adored the bed of ash, and he treasured the smoke of renounced flesh, and the idols of lingering will. He was enamored with this epitome of loneliness, witnessing the same meandering, directionless solitude that had dogged his steps from the moment of his birth. The same abandonment, and ill-directed favor. And in their union, he saw the power that would give him vindication. Not in action, but in knowledge. In the understanding that however unfulfilled his dream might be, _he_ was the stronger, and being bound to her was the sweetest, most bracing torment there could be. In that, it was no torment, but guidance, and kindred direction. In the art of dancing, she was his weaving smoke, and in the bristle of fire and dark, she was always with him, and always his. As he was hers, haunting his sword, and shadowing his person, the nurturing, maternal mirror to the regal fatherhood that had abandoned him. The title of Fume Knight was all he was, and everything he had done and found done to him had led him to this eternal moment of companionship, guardianship, and family.

Here he would stand, and here he would stay. Service, brotherhood, condemnation, vengeance...all were secondary to his new devotion. No more did he have a place for retribution and regret, and memory was a distraction better left unattended. Familiarity might breed a flash of recognition, but he was certain that he was where he belonged. 

Left Hand. Raven. Son. Brother. Rebel. Traitor. Exile. Raime had taken many titles in his time, and all had served him, his duty, and his purpose, in their own way. His name would be subsumed and he could be content in the one role that afforded him everlastingly new, true purpose. 

He was the Fume Knight. He was the Champion of Nadalia, and he would never forsake her. Such was his fate, such was his charge, and such was his joy.


	30. Sir Alonne

Haloed by the waxing and waning light, he waits, and he watches, and he wonders. At the peak of a once-humble edifice, he meditates.

He remembers the listless transience that consumed him, severed from his homeland. Exile, or escape, or even simple wanderlust. All fitting catalysts for the journey that would bring him glory, redeem his honor, and exercise his strength. And it was a long odyssey indeed, as he tired of aimless diversions and tangled divisions, petty squabbles and hopeless campaigns. None were of value, but in his own heart, he knew not if he was worthy himself. Doubt is an insidious plotter, and it does not attack but instead poisons, eroding with lies, betrayal, and sabotage. It was in the grip of such uncertainty that fleeting determination bade him forward, and brought him to the most peculiar of causes, and that strangest of states. One enfeebled, but burning bright with ambition, and reaching higher still in spite of their station. Audacity that might have merited condemnation, but, in witnessing such disrespect for limitations, he recognized the potential that might rise above the perspective of history and contemporary era. For their weakness was on the brink of metamorphosis, and the power that emerged would shake the world. So it was that he was sworn, and bound, on the impetus of little more than a curiosity, and the privilege of rootless impulse. But a kernel of respect rested within, and camaraderie with such bold aspiration.

He recalls the path towards ascension, when he stepped forward and was the hand of his Lord, scouting, slaying, and securing. He could be comfortable in the knowledge that, though he was the extension of another, it was by his own might that such advance and enclosing was enabled. It was by his own artistry that all lands trembled, and by his own finesse that all were ripe and richly delivered. Those were the brightest, most energetic years of his life, when the world was his to struggle against and always emerge the better. He had taken a little-known and unestablished lord and brought him not merely onto the stage, but into a starring role. His blade, bewitched but in his thrall, was well-glutted with the ebb of lives. It was the terror of the earth, and the defining instrument of power in all lands. Single-handedly, he cut new borders and carved up vaunted unions, and when the demands of growth exceeded what one blade, however peerless, could cut, he imparted his ways on to new generations of knights. The shadow of his homeland sallied forth, under new armor and bearing new arms, in a new name, a new visage, and his master's banner.

He reflects on the apotheosis that crowned their rise, when he could turn inward, to refine the sharpest edge into an acuity that bent light, shattered wind, and rent the world. And he could project outward, as his name grew, his means blossomed, and his camaraderie deepened. For his master, his companion from the very start, who owed nearly everything to him, was not merely his Lord, but his friend. Not merely his ally and comrade, but his brother. In his Lord, he had found a new direction, and in him, his Lord had found a new foundation. However much they ascended, they would never forget the frailty, uncertainty, and trust that had forged them in their early days. He instructed, to impart his legacy to the future and extend his hand, by his own will and his Lord’s. He observed, curious and skeptical, as endeavors to give soul to flame, and life to iron, sputtered and wavered before roaring in success. He commanded, directing and guiding from afar, but he never lost his drive, and never failed to take up the blade, whether to heed his brother’s call or to satisfy his own demands of honor. When prosperity, born of conquest and enterprise, attracted flattery, pandering, and supplication, he could be proud to stand apart from the charlatans and pretenders as a true master of refined arts. 

He reminisces on the division that sundered them, when the relentless drive that had powered his brother’s rise burned those around him. The march of time was a steady one, but such a congruence of degradation in the world and exhaustion of his Lord’s soul was unfortunate indeed. Martial predilection gave way to cruelty, experimentation to futility, taste to wastefulness, and the clarity of vision that had succored such a meteoric ascent was occluded by hedonism, greed, desperation, and wrath. Every transgression could be understood, at first, but when excuses and justifications fell short of the circumstances and he knew there were no answers, the terrible, painful understanding was all that remained. 

There was little left of the man who had brought him into his service so long ago. Who had yearned for more, giving him purpose and hope, and who had been in concert with him as they made the world theirs. Had he been such from the beginning, and it was only the height of power that brought out the truth of his self? Or had his Lord been better inclined, and it was only upon holding the world in his palm that he became something worse? The latter offered some comfort, but reflected ill on his own potential to maintain his honor in his glory, while the former sentenced him for his blindness from the very start.

There was only one recourse. Departure. Or, at the very least, withdrawal. If his Lord, friend, and brother retained some flicker of his past self, or of what they had shared he would understand his knight’s decision. And even if he did not, Sir Alonne knew that, deep within the Iron King, the man he had pledged himself to, and shared such suffering and success with, had to remain. 

Sir Alonne would wait. He would meditate, in the highest room of his Lord’s tower, and he would remember. Beside him was that old throne, the first sovereignty that his comrade had taken for his own, so small and simple when compared to the glory that the Iron King had achieved, and the gilded seats that had marked his advance. But by keeping it close, Sir Alonne prayed that, in some life, in some world, his brother would recognize what he had come from, what he had become, and what he had forsaken. Hopes and honor were fragile things to build a future upon, but they were all that he had left.


	31. Aava, the King's Pet

When snow scatters across mountains, forests, and castles alike, blanketing them in a frigid and paralyzing frost, they are the wind that carries it afar. 

When the dead of winter hides the sun for months on end, wan and distant like the shriveled, pale eye of a corpse, they are the mist that occludes it.

When the winds howl over your words and weave mirages before your eyes, they are the roar that deafens you to your friends and the stripes that befuddle your direction. 

When the cold freezes your tears in your eyes and your tongue in your mouth, spiking your hair to your scalp and caking your skin in iced sweat, they are the vortex that calls the storm. 

Their claws are the icicles that turn every cave into an uneasy refuge. Their teeth are the frostbite that cleaves your toes from your feet and your fingers from your hands. Their paws are the shock of an avalanche of sleet. Their weight is the terror of a calving iceberg. Their breath is the last murmur of heat in your heart before you sink into shivering sleep.

Seven they are, and seven they were when they became what they still will be. Each slotted into their piece in the puzzle of the land that would be and remains Eleum Loyce, loyal to the last. Only he who would dare to see them his equal would deign to humor himself with their pretended title. “Pet”. Insufficient verbiage for the true power and purpose that each kept coiled in their paws and tail, poised to spring at the slightest provocation. 

Whatever your quest, you have not earned the right. The blizzard is their home, and the more you shiver, the more they purr. The grim north is no place for you, and in this place, you are lost and alone. Here, you are hunted, and here, you are prey.


	32. Burnt Ivory King

Victory in battle meant little without farms to feed the survivors. Glory in combat meant even less without stability to ensure the bloodshed was mitigated. All in service to the simple hope that life might be thought valuable, and that peace was the most precious commodity of all. Whatever wars were fought, land and gold and hate could not be richer than joy. 

A noble sentiment. One that might have saved Forossa, had it not already been mired in prolonged conflict with its neighbors. But perhaps Forossa was not to blame, for those hemmed in by hostility must often gird themselves against exploitation through exercises of power. If only those forays did not become the goal, rather than the reluctant salve. 

Yet that was in the past, and Forossans had scattered to the world around them as their land had buckled under the weight of their wars. Brigands and bandits, sellswords and mercenaries, knights and soldiers...whatever their name and role, Forrosans found themselves well-equipped to make use of the skills that had failed to save their home. 

The mightiest among them sought more. His sageship was complete, but he had no people left to be heralded as oracle for, and so he pressed on, and found his purpose to the north, past those he had once called enemies. Where the mountains that hemmed his people in with their foes gave way to great, still whiteness, terrifying and remote, a shield against incursion by its very starkness. Here, he found others dispossessed like his own person, and curated within them a powerful drive to flourish.

To those who became his new people, he was the enigma behind a sheet of iron, his countenance formidable and imposing and well suited to the identity that he projected onto them. Better, perhaps, for his people to not know the truth of his past, of his self. Some might call them his subjects, but he could not separate himself from the isolation that had gripped him before, and so however distant he kept them, he called them comrades.

Nor would he call his dearest friends anything less than they deserved. “Pet” was a moniker reserved for needling and play, but these were not meek kittens, and they were not his tame trophies. They rose to his heights, rather than be cowed by his power, and he molded his direction for them in place of expecting obedience that would never come, in spite of their loyalty.

In Eleum Loyce, the cold that might have hardened others gave them will and strength, and nurtured within its inhabitants a regard for the fragility of peace so rarely sought elsewhere. The King’s lost home lived on, all of its best hopes carried forward.

When she came, he knew, and he loved her for who she was, in spite...no,  _ because _ of herself. Because of what he recognized in all of humanity. He did not begrudged her hope, and he smothered her troubles as readily as he accepted her nature.

And, like too many human kingdoms, fire and dark were its ruin. But the fire of betrayal and of a broken world did not erupt here, consuming humanity into feeding an endless, hopeless hunger. And the dark was not the dark of mankind amok, but man’s own weakness, its failure to wait and watch and instead travel afar in its own flickering restlessness.

The churning, writhing chaos was not placated by worship, but Alsanna still prayed. It was not restrained by walls, but he still erected them to temper its wrath. 

And, though it did not yearn for sacrifice, he still knew what it required. His Knights by his side, his friends at their posts, his wife at vigil...nothing else could be more ready. In the absence of a name, his title and witness would preserve his legend.

The Ivory King, yet unburnt, stepped to his fate willingly. He would be burnt, but never broken. 


	33. Darklurker

In the purest Dark, predating and unleashed and now the grave of some ancient, dissipated being, there is no place for light. No place for brightness, that might cut the sacred blackness and agitate the serenity of shadow. Where Fire exists, disparity flourishes, and so any flame that encroaches upon true Abyssal silence must be snuffed out. 

Dark does not corrupt in excess, but parodies the churning in men, unveiling flimsy pretensions to normalcy. It happened once, in the fragmentation of that primordial human and the legend and consequences that entailed, and again is paralleled in that which followed the imparting of some fragment of outside light to four. There, poisoned by serpentine bearing, and dangling rewards of reclaiming birthright, change manifested, into something twisted but wholly at home in the Abyss...and a testament to the swirling, uneven shifting of these dual powers of Dark, chaotic yet peaceful, and Light, controlled yet corrosive.

It is unfortunate, then, that something like such latter light has entrenched itself here. It is not kin to these caverns, and not familiar to this void. It is a squatter, an intruder, but more than that, a toxin and a cancer, threatening to unravel the fabric of this venerable, tranquil Dark. It cannot be tolerated.

So light is brought in, to lure it out, however forsaken such illumination might normally be. As Fire fades, and the inevitability of Dark remains, the Abyss is needed, now, more than ever, to usher in the new order, or lack thereof, and secure some sort of peace in the dwindling that follows. The natural way of things is perverted enough as is: better to smooth the transition to the next course of the world.

Use light to destroy light. It burrows into the desiccated graves of that primeval man, and those furtive first humans, a posthumous sigh of death that lives on in the recesses of the world. It lurks in the Dark, but does not call it home, and must be driven out. Aspirations of mankind, but not understood, and reflections of ideal, but of a darker, inner countenance. Elevated, but not divine. Such as it might be gleaned, distantly and uncertainly, that is its nature.

Long after, in some distant kingdom, a heavenly daughter will behold a reflection of this angelic figure, one both corrupted by more exhausted light and purified by shallower dark. The absence of the sun, and its overambition, will render her mute and blind, but inspire new imitations, new followings, new heresies, and new torments, unshackled from the Abyss but still in debt to it. These will find alternative purchases, in the corpses of stone-humped pilgrims, as butterflies and parasites, more monstrous than a simple Darklurker, but knowingly kin to it, and those that hid before.

For they owe their existence to the legacy of this hanger-on, this usurper of the Abyss. They hold as their inheritance humanity's own ambition, and the gamut of their reach. As all angels do.


	34. Vendrick

All humans share the same source, the same conception. They slip into the world, pushed forward to face whatever circumstances surround their birth, but from the very beginning, they are threaded by the same needle into the stitching of the human condition. A patchwork established long, long ago, by hands that did not have their interests in consideration.

The curse of life, of existing and living, is the curse of want, and of suffering. To walk this earth is to endure what it can force upon you, and to persevere is to eke out survival until the next misery stands in your way. And through it all, you survive and persist, to grasp at whatever joy you can find and whatever hope gives you meaning, faint and fragile as they may be, but still tangible and wonderful. Such is humanity’s lot, and such is the way of things, as it ever has been and shall be.

What defiance can such terrible certainty entertain? What secret betrayal could upend such torturous despair, and shatter the shackles that had grown into the core of humanity? None dared know, but only one pair had the audacity to reach and dream for more.

Vendrick was a ruler of men, subject to their same whimsies and frailties, but he nurtured within himself a hope for more. For something beyond the certainty of death and undeath, for a shape that stretched past suffering and into the deeper truths beyond. This same conviction that would raise him and his kingdom to the greatest heights humanity had ever trod upon would be the same unwavering path that brought it all crumbling down.

Unity bred prosperity, and coordination engendered might. Both are anathema to human independence, but he imposed his will nonetheless, and with the weight of his strength he vanquished the relics of the past. The graves of the Old Ones, those vestiges of old systems of power, became the fertile soil upon which he built his kingdom, in defiance of the corpses of lost lands that littered his domain. Prior cycles would not stifle Vendrick’s vision, and the failure to quench that terrible flame would not dampen his hopes.

Thus it was that a mere King became a titan among men, a towering monument to humanity’s achievements. And yet it was all so fragile, the foundations already trembling beneath the weight of what had been accomplished, and in apprehension of what was to come. 

And he saw. Vendrick, in his foresight, in his dauntless forward-thinking, knew that the castles he built were as sand, the empire he had forged as unstable as those who had come before, the ones he had conquered and even before them. He shunned those who spoke of Gods, wary of the promises of those who could have been said to shape the fate of men, and put his faith in the utilitarianism of men. His armors were practical, his men loyal, his armies tempered with function and patience over elegance and form...and it worked, until it didn’t, and the fault could not have been any less his own.

And then she came. Beautiful and ethereal, elegant and graceful, slim and sharp, she whispered of distant enemies, united in mind and firm in drive, hungry to leap on his weakness. More tellingly, she murmured of the emptiness that dwelled within them...and the vitality that rose beyond humanity.

Vendrick _had_ to have it. His kingdom was assailed, but he could still field mighty armies, and he could still extend his reach well beyond his borders. He sailed afar, to lands of alien sizes, where the trees towered beyond the clouds and the rivers ran the length of seas, to seize those his dear lady had both warned him against and promised rewards from. The Giants were made to serve, shackled in the same irons that invisibly bound humanity, and the void in their hearts was exactly what he had been looking for. 

Drangleic rose anew, grander than ever before, the pinnacle of humanity in this age or the last, or any that might follow. Tireless automatons erected glittering cathedrals and towering edifices, symbols of his power and the duty he owed his people. And, perhaps most importantly...to the woman, now Queen, who had enabled it all, and found her place at his side as his love.

Fortunes rose, and all was well. Peace left them complacent and content, and Vendrick allowed his joy to blind him, even if the violence that had engendered his flourishing golden age darkened his countenance with each passing day. His first mistake, but it was an error that had afflicted many before, and would trouble many more after him. And he had been doomed from the start: such was the way of the world, as set from that wretched reversal of the natural order. From the banishing of Dark, the obliteration of the truth, all cast in a terrible, circular seal of fire. Long before he had walked this earth, Vendrick and all like him had been struggling against the cycle of creation...and now, destruction was upon them.

When the Curse touched flesh, Vendrick could not, _would_ not accept it. Life was suffering, and it was pain, and it was death and misery and finality, but he had come too far to accept an even grander wretchedness. Humanity would never, not in his rule, play another role in a cosmic satire, a prop in the tragedy of the rise and fall of worldly renewal and rot. 

Torture, assassination, exile, imprisonment...all balms and salves, temporary dressings for the gangrene of humanity’s withering, but useful in the service of more time, more pursuits. Distant and familiar lands, drowned in poison, succumbed to flame, and slumbering in ice, all proved worthwhile, if abortive pursuits. Vendrick’s hopes engendered the revival of extinct precursors, in a sense, and the melding of human and Ancient in the form of a terribly frail girl. Herself exempt, but not what he had been looking for.

His elder sibling, never in pursuit of power, went his own way, and Vendrick left him to his own devices, condemned for his means and their consequences. Aldia would find his path, and nudge Vendrick’s along, but their fervor withered their family ties. One more shattered clan in the puzzle that the world was fast becoming, but he had seen such division before. His left and right arms clashed, and the former was cast away for treason and disloyalty, however true that lonely knight claimed their cause to be.

Desperation took its toll on the shining majesty of Drangleic, and in the depths of his despair, terrified and troubled, the worst came to pass. 

His abductions had not gone unnoticed, and the debt he owed the Giants was due to be paid. Drangleic would not stand to their onslaught, even as he rallied in the face of crisis. Undeath, and his struggle, receded to the depths of memory, and the world shuddered under the weight of it all. Two titans clashed: one, united in body and mind, giant in name and stature and being, and the other, the very swarms of humanity, that had squabbled and buckled beneath the fragile bonds of order, finally together in the face of utter destruction.

Vendrick lost more than he could ever replace, and the emptiness that gripped him left him closer to his enemies than he would ever know. When victory came, it was no triumph. Without lands to sustain his dominions, he was bereft; without power to control, he was helpless; and without people to rule, he was lonely and lost. 

How could he have achieved his grand dreams of salvation then? Humanity was shattered, the Curse manifesting more and more, and he was in no place to look further. His brother, his oldest friend, was gone, his knights depleted and ragged. He only had his Queen, fair and wonderful, to smother his sorrows. She who had saved him, and she who had nudged the first link in the chain of his collapse.

And then, Vendrick knew. He knew what he had partaken of, what he had lain with, what he had surrounded himself with as he glutted his appetite of power, prestige, and peace, and how terribly wrong he had been. How horribly pointless it had been from the start. His left had been right, but his right had not left, and all was confusion and fear.

He fled, and with each obstacle, he hoped that whatever ruin had come to Drangleic, she would not make it worse. 

Knights, and a particular Knight, to block her in her feebleness, that she could never conquer.

The sanctity of Dark, though she was ken, that she could never tarnish.

A key, that would fit no keychain she could carry.

A door, shuttered, undone only with a power she could never have.

A shroud, that she could never wear.

And, at last, a kinship, that she could never know, sequestered away where she could never reach.

There, in the deep Darkness that was kin to his own Dark Soul, did Vendrick dream and wait. He had failed, robbed of time, but he was so, _so_ close to what he had sought. 

Seize the First Flame, and harness the Dark Soul. Someone who would rise above the role that he had rejected, someone who would humble the title of Lord of Cinder, would have to hold both in concert. Impossible, and yet...it was the only way. The only way to break the cycle, to allow humanity to become what it was _meant_ to be.

Even if he could never achieve it, he would cozen Nashandra of the prize he knew she needed...and find some victory in that.

His heart broke to do it, but he had always put his wants behind his needs. Now, he had but to wait, to hope that whoever came next would know what was at stake. He would have to ease their passage with his own weakness, and bind their soul to his blessing when they at last came to understand what it meant for humanity to seek strength.

And it is here that you find him, withered and alone, naked save for a crown. A parody of majesty, humbled with self-imposed humiliation to push you on your quest. Glimpses into the fog are not enough to undo what you witness. You will step forward and onward, until the cycle stops, a witness to the end. Light, dark, and what lies beyond...

Vendrick has suffered enough. For him, for all of humanity, something must change. And it starts with you.


	35. Nashandra

Shriveled and alone, brought to madness and twisted into more of himself than he could possibly ever hope to be, the Father of all that was human perished. But that which lurked within mankind was not so easily reduced to nothing, and could never fade so long as its component ilk still walked the earth.

So it was that each tiny splinter, minute and alone, alien to all it could know and sheared from the only one that might be called familiar, came to be.

Fear, wrath, solitude, love, and so much more. All pieces in the puzzle that was the Dark Soul of humanity. And frailest of all, smallest and most eager to slither forward through the cracks in the spirit.

Desire. That which molded anger into violence, loneliness into isolation, fear into cowardice, love into envy, and pride into ego, to name but a few. Left alone, it festered, rotting away at the foundations of its boons even as it clawed for more and more, lest it be granted nothing at all. She was the hunger that begged for food even when full; the risk that called for another gamble when there was already so much gained; the rich man who could only gather more flagrant wealth in spite of his plenty; and the greed that exhausted itself in pursuit of even _more._ She was every mourner who would never stop wanting the lost, every dreamer who never dared to surrender their aspirations, every downtrodden who would never cease their struggle to rise. And Nashandra could not stop wanting, not stop seeking. She could not achieve, could not thrive, could not grow, only take and grasp for what was next. Born into invisible shackles from the very start, a prisoner of desire, of all the yearnings and wishes that humanity had ever conjured in their hopes.

Such would it be that she found herself, a fragment of the Abyss, desperate for _more_. More power, more souls, more security. More Dark, more of that tranquil shadow, stifling all that it did not contort into its own purposes in the deepest, darkest, most suffocating peace. Her yearning found form in grace and elegance, allure and queenliness, stately and imposingly commanding. With warm words and urgent warnings, she crept into confidence. She murmured and he assented, and the monuments to his love and gratitude became the beacons of his blindness, folly, and distraction, as his thoughts turned elsewhere, to the questions that puzzled humans as they faced their fate. But still he nurtured within himself a misguided adoration, and still she demanded more. More glory, more adoration, more control, even as she guided events towards ruination...and her true, desperate need.

Souls were paltry, and Queendom was fleeting. True satisfaction lay in power, and the truest power to be taken was in _fire_ , that primal, knowing warmth and its absence, and in the silhouette it left that danced as it flickered. In it, in the blaze that began it all, she might find that which satisfied her at last, that which had born in her precursor that terrible wonder.

Cruel discovery, after so many successes, cut her short, but an eternity of unsatisfaction gave rise in her to a patience beyond men. And she already had one who would serve to lift the blocks her dear husband had set in fear of her. The doors warded against her touch, the guardians she could not overcome, the murk of time that shrouded the final key...all these would crumble before her new, adoring fool. Her brave Undead.

Perhaps Nashandra might at last attain what she needed, in the First Flame, and the shadows cast by fire, in the heat that rose and the chill at its edge, that blazed all the brighter as ash ate away at its fuel until it sputtered and faded. Only to rise anew, a new fire, a new face, a new kingdom and a new cycle. That wholeness might fill the void in her, the emptiness that had lurked in her soul since time immemorial, and that hid in all humankind.

But better to put Nashandra to rest. Want could never stop wanting. Greed would destroy its own foundations, hunger would consume itself, and lust would unravel its own wants. All would fail before they were satisfied. Hopes and dreams were, after all, the most intrinsic elements of the human condition. And a prisoner of desire, cursed to need more than she could ever find, driven to seek further and sink deeper, could never truly be free. 

Mayhaps, in death, the tiniest, frailest, weakest shard of man, and daughter of Manus, might achieve the completion she'd dared to hope to find.


	36. Aldia, Scholar of the First Sin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who's followed this! I originally did these for the Dark Souls II playthroughs done by [TenMoreMinutes](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn5okaoIT7P7Sk9vIJJLoYhHpXiGjmtDn)!TenMoreMinutes and [TB Skyen](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgXBK8VQ11v86xDCJ57_jpuXc6D8AoAqm) on YouTube, so check them out!

What, exactly, constitutes a limitation, a boundary? Who defined them, and by what means were they sustained? More importantly...how could they be broken?

From a young age, he had been fascinated with questions of barriers. How they could be pressed upon, how they could be strained, and where and when they were to be shattered. His thoughts had turned from fascination to inquiry, from a curiosity to a drive to  _ know _ . To see what could be done when the world, and all the forces and creatures within it, could be pushed to their extreme. As a youth, this was expected, and welcomed, for though life held danger, an urge for exploration was to be lauded in fledgling minds, and endless questions from children were precocious and amusing, even when those who were seen as authority did not have the answers. As an adolescent, it could be manifested in rebellious experimentation for the sake of going against the grain, and turn from endearing to exasperating, but his grudging acceptance of regulation did temper the anger that might be directed at him. For he was not merely a son, but a brother, and an elder at that, and in such a position certain standards were expected of him. Ones that he chafed against, but nonetheless adhered to...but intrinsic drives, however dampened, could not be quenched. 

But he could wait. He saw the potential in his blood, in his family, and though he knew that his fate may lay elsewhere, he was also content to wait, to bide his time, for such a moment when it might be appropriate to turn back to his search. For even at this point in his life, still sprouting, he knew that there was something fundamentally  _ wrong _ with the world. With the assumptions and traditions that bound it. But better to live in them, and learn of them, then exhaust himself in fruitless search so soon. And for all his pragmatism, he  _ did _ love his family, and could not have foreseen the sorrow that awaited.

With the prime of his life came the fine-tuning of his person. His ambitions remained unclear, uncertain, and undefined, confronted as he was by new inputs and new articles of interaction. It might have overwhelmed him, if not for his brother’s mirrored drive to be more than this. To rise above this banal, stifled existence, and to become greater. Aldia, though elder, was quite happy to let Vendrick be the charismatic face, the magnetic figurehead. No, not a figurehead, for that implied a foundation of sand, rather than a personification of true power. And Vendrick was, fundamentally, as powerful as he was brilliant, as wise as he was bold. Aldia saw his brother as the brighter reflection of Aldia’s own qualities, save for the mystique of leadership and raw might: those were traits all of Vendrick’s own person. Aldia, instead, had certain absences of restraint, and a particular stubbornness, that exceeded his brother. And he used both to help his kin destroy the heirs of the old order, and build a magnificent kingdom on their graves.

As a monarch, as a King, Vendrick was as empathetic and considerate as he was capable of terrible vengeance and relentless demands for advancement. So, he excelled in all, and paid Aldia what was due his service, and his brotherhood. The mansion and the lands beyond were exactly what he had sought: a space to grow, to learn, to study, and to explore, without outside restrictions. Such a compulsion, perhaps even obsession, did little to endear him to those who stood apart from his perception, and though he was stifled by their intrusion and lack of vision, for many years he knew that he was yet to be in a place where such concerns could be ignored. Now, he was free, and he was ready to unlock the answers to the questions that had plagued him for so long. He could find solutions, uncover secrets, and get ever-closer to the eternal query that still lay at the heart of the world. Drangleic was the better for his discoveries, and his service to his brother’s kingdom continued in newer, more innovative form.

And then, crisis. The curse of Undeath, for one, and the frantic desperation that followed. Aldia’s amusements and occasional advancements became essential explorations into the nature of humanity, the structure of this affliction, and the reprieve. He minutely, surgically sifted through everything that he could find, and when his old exploits gave no answers, he turned to the new resources that had been given to him. Ones that may have turned a lesser stomach, but Aldia had never been much for restraint, and the chafing against expectation fell away into unbridled disgust. It devolved into sneering rejection of the very idea that, in the face of such a complete oblivion of the self as the Undead Curse, any potential solution that was left un-exploited for fear of punishment or condemnation was a monstrous disservice to those it could save, more so than the suffering that such answers might require. His brother’s subjects, already disquieted by Aldia’s oddness, now turned to paranoia and rumormongering, and for once, they were well on the way to accuracy. But the extremes they warned of were yet to come to pass, for even his frustration at the lack of progress never metastasized into superfluous cruelty. Not yet, at the very least. Thus it was that Aldia abandoned, for a time, the hypothesis that in the very Undead that afflicted them, the cure might be found.

Then that woman, alone and afraid and pleading not just for help, but for her warnings to be listened. Aldia had remained not merely skeptical, but distrustful, but among Vendrick’s flaws, he was too entranced by the trappings of flesh, and so he heeded her call to arms and conquest. Looking back, Aldia could not be certain whether to curse his brother for his blindness, or thank him for what he had come to uncover. Perhaps they were less different than Aldia thought: they  _ both _ would have followed this newcomer’s advice, after all. Because what they discovered may have been exactly what they had been looking for.

Mighty beings, of one mind, one will, one thought, bound by vine and stone. They dreamed in unity, growing more tangled and ordered, but with a critical exception. They did not lose their self in death, returning only to fade more and more. Instead, simply...stopped. They ceased, and they rested, for in the absence of individuality, they had no fullness that could be emptied by the Curse. They could not Hollow, though they held their souls.

It was nearly everything he had needed. The butcher’s bill was high, but the souls of the giants, when properly separated, gave the blueprint for automatons that could rebuild Drangleic and repulse the curse. Only through force of might, but it would give Aldia time. Time to investigate those old precursors, from a time before Fire, and the nuances in between. Paleontology had given evidence of these ancients, of the Everlasting Dragons, and something between impulse and excitement drove him and Vendrick to meld a soul of the giant with the fossils that had been uncovered, and the vestiges of the Ancient Dragon soul unearthed in the crystal mines. The result had been a facsimile of those long-gone creatures, but it served their purpose in peering backwards, into ages past, and in staying strong in the face of undeath.

So they tried again. The same power of the dragon’s soul, and the dragon’s blood, with a fragment of the soul of humanity. Of it was born a child, a girl, entrusted to the imitation they had crafted, and they watched her growth with interest that only grew as her immunity became apparent. But further exploration proved fruitless, and the height of their success fell to the depths of failure. For while Shanalotte was free of Undeath, some other flaw prevented her gift from going further beyond herself. And in isolation, she could not be called a success.

This was not their first dead end, but it was the first that truly divided Vendrick from Aldia. Vendrick saw the solution in humanity, in some balance between light and dark, whereas Aldia’s disillusionment had grown. Humanity itself was simply too intrinsic to the Curse for the solution to lie with them. Giants, dragons...whatever others they found, he was certain would have only one thing in common. A lack of humanity, of the Dark Soul.

His exploitation and experimentation grew. He no longer had guests, or serfs, or soldiers, or partners. He had potential and imminent test subjects, whose baser human forms were to be left behind in the wake of his pursuit. Vendrick did not understand.  _ Could _ not understand. The King’s hopes were too tied up in the trappings of humanity to possibly succeed, in the eyes of Aldia, and in any event, the new incursion of those vengeance-seeking Giants, and the resurgence of the Curse, put paid to many of his brother’s plans to seek a solution. So Aldia was not surprised by his exile, performative as it was. He could continue playing his role, well content that in his mind, he was right. 

Now, his goals were not the severing of humanity from the Curse. He was well certain that this simply was not how the world functioned, and for all his urge to destroy barriers, he knew not how this could be overcome. Instead, he sought to split humanity from itself. If the Curse was tied to being human, then the simple answer was that the time had come to no longer  _ be _ human at all. Any price was worth being paid, to further this goal, and ensure the segregation of the soul from humanity.

How had he succeeded? Was it some combination of Dragons, Giants, and Old Chaos? Something else, or something more? Aldia hardly cared, for in the state that he found himself in afterwards, he was in no place to replicate it. Atop a mountain of bodies, amidst a vortex of spent souls, Aldia had done it. He had shed his humanity, and shed death, and life itself. He was in between, free of the boundaries of the soul, and free of the cycle of the world.

And it was miserable. His full body, such as he had one, could not present itself fully. The world was sundered from his ability to interact with it, as far as he could find. Save those amalgamations of undead, the Bonfires, his passage was restricted, and his voice was shuttered. He could neither impart his knowledge nor effect his will in such a state, and much like with Shanalotte, if his results could not be replicated, it was useless.

So he lingered. No coherent, consistent body, no soul, no presence. He had failed in breaking humanity free from undeath, even as he had succeeded at overcoming that most essential barrier of all. But perhaps his folly had been far, far older, in believing, from the start, that such limitations could be overcome without consequences. He could only watch as those few things he had cared about in life...his brother, Drangleic, his world...faded and degraded, brought about by that cursed woman, and so much more. He had lost everything,and he had sought to shed the yoke of fate, but failed. 

All he could do was watch. And await an answer. To light, dark, and what might lie beyond. Mayhaps he would yet see the day when Vendrick’s hopes were realized, where the Dark Soul and the First Flame could be wielded in tandem, freeing humanity from either while retaining their essential soul. Maybe the First Flame would be put to rest, to die in darkness, and only spark anew at its proper time, in the hopes that none of this would play out the same way again, and that the world could go its natural course without fear obscuring its passage.

He would watch. He would watch the forlorn, kin to his Forlorn, as one escaped and clawed their way past the old masters, banqueting on gods. He would watch as kingdoms of Hollows, in his own image and hidden direction, sought to follow in his brother’s path and hold two paradoxes in tandem. He would watch, and tutor, as a frail, cursed prince refused his duty, and let the flame flicker out. He would watch a world without fire, shunted away in hidden graves, until wrested back by reneging from duty, and then by betrayal. He would watch dying attempts to hold on to whatever cinders were left. And he would watch, at the very end of it all, as one man glutted himself on the all the life of the world, consuming the Dark Soul in its entirety, and fought over nothing, in a barren nowhere, where the sun had winked out and all was sand and dust. And he would watch so, so much more, before this final struggle, and in the scraps of fate that follow.

The First Sin had been defiance. Defiance of age, defiance of degradation, and defiance of all that should be. In that sense, Aldia was little different from that old Lord of Light. Aldia struggled to defy limits, and that older one, Gwyn, had fought to preserve his crumbling order. Both had been trapped by their pursuit and their fear, and both could do little more but linger on in half-lives, desperately hoping that someone might do something different next time. That life and death, heat and cold, light and dark, could find concert and harmony, or, at least, mutual oblivion, to extinguish this cursed conflict. Aldia had never thought that he would find himself agreeing with that precursor to all that afflicted humanity, but time had an amusing way of blurring old convictions. 

And all Aldia had left was time, from now to the end of the world.


End file.
